What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors?

“So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent…. Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger…. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now….”

What kind of climatic mini-catastrophes might move public and policymaker opinion over the next decade? Please share your thoughts below.

“The battleship USS Arizona belches smoke as it topples over into the sea during a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a Dec. 7, 1941 file photo. The ship sank with more than 80 percent of its 1,500-man crew, including Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd. The attack, which left 2,343 Americans dead and 916 missing, broke the backbone of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and forced America out of a policy of isolationism.” (AP Photo/File)

Yesterday marked the 71th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. In the wake of the extreme weather in the past two years, including superstorm Sandy — all of which served to increase concern about global warming among the public and some politicians — I’m updating my post from 3 years ago, “What are the near-term climate Pearl Harbors?” (which I had updated already last year).

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

A NY Timesblogger posed this question, “What kind of wake-up call does Mr. Romm think is conceivable on a time scale relevant to near-term policy?”

My reply was “Multiple Pearl Harbors over the next decade — half or more of these happening” followed by a list of 9 items.

If FDR had said, “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked. But we’re still working to identify the perpetrators.” Well, not bloody much would have happened.

Of course, the U.S. military had some warnings, but there was a massive volume of intelligence signals (“noise”) coming in. Roberta Wohlstetter wrote in 1962: “To discriminate significant sound against this background of noise, one has to be listening for something or for one of several things…. One needs not only an ear but a variety of hypotheses that guide observation.”

The Japanese commander of the attack, Mitsuo Fuchida, was quite surprised he had achieved surprise. Before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, the Japanese Navy had used a surprise attack to destroy the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor in Port Arthur. Fuchida asked, “Had these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?“

So if you have the right hypothesis or worldview, you can make sense out of “noisy” warnings. If you don’t, then you will be oblivious even to signs that in retrospect will seem quite obvious. Certainly future generations will be stunned by our obliviousness.

In the case of the almost non-stop series of “off the charts” extreme climatic events that many opinion leaders seem shocked about over and over again — they aren’t merely “explainable and predictable” after the fact. They were very often predicted or warned about well in advance by serious people. The powers that be simply choose to ignore the warnings because they don’t fit their world view.

Unfortunately for the nation and the world, there is no American Churchill on climate. Quite the reverse:

A [multi-year] megadrought hitting the SW [and Great Plains] comparable to what hit southern Australia.

More superstorms, like Katrina.

A heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003 one [Russia's in 2010] but hitting the U.S. breadbasket.

Something unpredicted but clearly linked to climate, like the bark beetle devastation.

Accelerated mass loss in Greenland and/or Antarctica, perhaps with another huge ice shelf breaking off, but in any case coupled with another measurable rise in the rate of sea level rise.

The Fifth Assessment Report (2012-2013) really spelling out what we face with no punches pulled.

And no, to preempt comments similar to one I had in the original post, I’m not “hoping” for those things to happen. Quite the reverse. I have have been proposing strong emissions reductions for many, many years to minimize the chances of catastrophic impacts. In any case, hope can’t change what is to come — only strong action now can.

The drought the U.S. has been experiencing is slowly getting to the level that can change thinking — let’s hope it doesn’t get to that level, though such Dust-Bowlification is inevitable if we don’t act soon.

Two years ago, Lester Brown explained to me that when the real food instability comes — if, for instance, the U.S. breadbasket gets hit with the type of 1000-year heat wave Russia did — then the big grain producers will ban exports, to make sure their people are fed. In this scenario, if you don’t have your own food supplies or an important export item to barter — particularly oil — your country is going to have big, big problems feeding its people. That might wake folks up a tad.

If you want 350 ppm — or if you want 450 ppm in a (likely) world where the permafrost has begun to turn into the permamelt — then because we have listened to the siren song of delay for so long, we will need a WWII-style and WWII-scale effort. As I noted in the conclusion to my book:

This national (and global) re-industrialization effort would be on the scale of what we did during World War II, except it would last far longer. “In nine months, the entire capacity of the prolific automobile industry had been converted to the production of tanks, guns, planes, and bombs,” explains Doris Kearns Goodwin in her 1994 book on the World War II homefront, No Ordinary Time. “The industry that once built 4 million cars a year was now building three fourths of the nation’s aircraft engines, one half of all tanks, and one third of all machine guns.”

The scale of the war effort was astonishing. The physicist Edward Teller tells the story of how Niels Bohr had insisted in 1939 that making a nuclear bomb would take an enormous national effort, one without any precedent. When Bohr came to see the huge Los Alamos facility years later, he said to Teller, “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that.” And we did it in under five years.

But of course we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, the world was at war, and the entire country was united against a common enemy. This made possible tax increases, rationing of items like tires and gasoline, comprehensive wage and price controls, a War Production Board with broad powers (it could mandate what clothing could be made for civilians), and a Controlled Material Plan that set allotments of critical materials (steel, copper, and aluminum) for different contractors.

How ironic that denial, driven in large part by conservative fear of big government, has created an “era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays” that will ultimately require somewhat bigger government (for several decades) to prevent catastrophe or, if the deniers truly “triumph,” then staggeringly huge government (for a century and probably much more) to “adapt” to [through a combination of abandonment, triage, and misery] a ruined world (see “Don’t believe in global warming? That’s not very conservative”).

Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential ...

These systems are driven in the main by sea surface heat which can be sapped to produce energy with OTEC. The more energy produced the more the ocean surface is cooled.

Part of this heat is converted to mechanical energy in the process but the bulk, 20 times the energy produce, is moved to the deep water heat sink that has a lower coefficient of exansion.

Kevin Trenberth, points out in a paper, "An imperative for climate change: tracking Earth's global enery", "The warming required to produce 1 mm SLR if the heat is deposited in the top 700 m of the ocean can take from 50 to 75 1020 J, or 110 1020 J if deposited below 700 m depth.

In other words you can move heat from the surface to the depths with OTEC to counter 50 percent of current sea level rise due to thermal expansion.

By sapping the heat of hurricanes you also diminish the amount of heat that would be moved from the tropics towards the poles and thus forestall melting.

This is the lesson of Hurricane Sandy, no one apparently cares to learn.

Great post that goes directly to the heart of the problem. I won't belabor whether Pearl Harbor was a "complete" surprise or not as history has already exposed that issue. However, we (humans) are under attack and it's an attack that we are directing at ourselves (as this post shows).

The scariest issue is your #3- Methane. However, to characterize it as "unexpected" is inaccurate. It has been talked about for over a decade now. It is, IMHO, the monster in the woodshed. Millions of tons of it are already being released. That's partially due to fracking but mostly by the warming of the "permafrost", as you have noted. Being about 20 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2 this is what is going to start the positive feedback loop that we will be totally helpless to address in any meaningful way. If the issue was ONLY CO2 we might have a chance as we have technologies that will lessen the amount of CO2 being expelled into the atmosphere and the ability to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. With the "sneak attack" of Methane, all bets are off and the pay window is closed.

Sadly, I fear, that by the time the "general public" and as a result our representatives "get it" the tipping point will be in the rear view mirror and we may as well speed on to oblivion at that point.

Hopefully, they will hear the choir singing and heed the song....before it IS too late...